Month: July 2017

Happy 1st of August! For us it is important date because it refers to a historic alliance concluded in 1291 by the three cantons of Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden. This marked the beginning of the Swiss Confederation.

For nearly 800 years, the Swiss confederation in various sizes has formed one of the world’s only republics. It has offered citizens a certain level of freedom and constancy not available elsewhere. Even today it retains some freedoms and individuals can vote locally on federal topics from town squares just by raising their hands.

It started, as we have indicated, long ago. The Old Swiss Confederacy was a joint settlement of Alpen communities. The Confederacy helped run trade routes through the Alps. In fact, the Charter was set up between the rural communities of Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden in 1291. It is thought to be the first document of its kind; however there may have been alliances before then.

By 1353, the in the confederation made common cause with others, including Glarus and Zug and the Lucerne, Zürich and Bern. They constituted the “Old Confederacy” that continued until late in the 15th century. By 1460, the cantons ran territory west of the Rhine and their power was increased by wins over the Habsburgs and Charles the Bold of Burgundy.

Modern Switzerland has turned out not to be so powerful. It avoided getting enmeshed directly in the EU, but it was sued by the US over banking practices a few years ago and did not stand up for clients. Instead it turned over names and was obviously intimidated by the US and the idea that its banks would be excommunicated by others around the world if they didn’t cooperate.

Additionally back in 2000, it severed the link between gold and the Swiss franc. And later it voted against a proposal to back the franc once again by a certain amount of gold.

Additionally, at the highest levels, Switzerland reflects elements of the European Union, at least informally even though it is not a member.

Switzerland is not the independent country it was before the 21st century. It still has some of its freedoms, however, and is not nearly so intimidated as some countries that are already part of the EU.

But it could be a lot freer than it is, and represents in its compromises, the increased dominance of large regions like the EU and US over countries not part of their various blocks.

Lior Yaffe: Yes, I’m one of the developers. And managing director of Jelurida the company established by the developers.

Blockcity: Listen to this: Ardor will open blockchain development to organizations and individuals across the world. The high barriers to getting started with blockchain are about to vanish.

Lior Yaffe: I believe the statement above is in the context of letting users create their own blockchain without the need to bootstrap a new network and the ability to use the Ardor APIs to develop decentralized applications.

Please refer to the Ignis Whitepaper for more details about the Ardor architecture

Blockcity: What does it use as the underlying technology, is it based on ETH.

Lior Yaffe: Of course not, it uses our own blockchain technology based on NXT and now developed into Ardor which you can think of as NXT 2.0. In a sense, we are competitors of ETH

Blockcity: You know ethereum has a bad rap nowadays.

Lior Yaffe: It will pass. They have such a good marketing machine. This discussion started from Dave’s post on Linkedin that Ardor is an Ethereum competitor which received a lot of attention. And rightly so.

Blockcity: The top four reasons ethereum will fail ultimately; 1. NOT AN IMMUTABLE BLOCKCHAIN; 2. NO SUPPLY CAP; 3. EXPLOITS AND WEAKNESSES; 4. CRYPTOCURRENCY ICOS ARE A RISK/

Lior Yaffe: Well as a competitor of ETH it’s hard for me to support ETH but this statement above is misleading. ETH will live on.

Blockcity: But with unlimited inflation.

Lior Yaffe: Well, let’s refute these claims one by one.

Nonsense, this of course this stems from the DAO incident. They made some mistakes handling this but I think that overall they did the right thing.

Not familiar enough with ETH to comment but it is a design decision with advantages and disadvantages.

Most exploits are not problems in the ETH core but in smart contracts built on top of it. Having said that, the smart contracts concepts is problematic, but for specific use cases it works very well. Our approach with NXT/Ardor is different we build the smart contracts for you.

ICOs are excellent way to raise money by startups without giving equity and other rights to VCs and wealthy investors which their interest may not align with the founder’s interests. For investors, this is a great opportunity to invest small amount of funds into startup companies. Investment avenue which has been practically closed for small investors until now.

Blockcity: What about Ardor does it have some of the same (potentially negative) attributes … What are its biggest positives.

Lior Yaffe: In Ardor we keep much tighter control over which code is running inside the blockchain. The core itself is accessible only to Jelurida developers or to 3rd party contributors but after extensive code review. This makes the code safer and reduces the chances of a systematic failure like we saw last week with the ETH parity multisig which turned out to be 0 sig wallet.

Blockcity: Are there other issues. What are the biggest strengths? Combatting bloat? Simplicity? Ease of use?

Lior Yaffe: I’ll answer with a question, do you remember your first Bitcoin transaction?

Blockcity: Yes.

Lior Yaffe: Do you remember the 3rd one?

Blockcity: I think so.

Lior Yaffe: Well, you were supposed to answer “no”, anyway, you realize that they are still stored in the Bitcoin blockchain even though you probably don’t care about them and will be stored there forever.

Blockcity: Yes.

Lior Yaffe: And every new node which downloads the Bitcoin/ETH/NXT blockchain has to revalidate all transactions since the Genesis block, otherwise it may end up on a malicious fork. So this model of linear growth forever cannot be sustainable, right?

Blockcity: Presumably not. So the biggest positive is that Ardor does away with the repetitious transaction notes.

Lior Yaffe: With Ardor we have a unique parent/child chain design which allows us to remove transactions which are no longer important from the consensus, but still maintain the same security guarantees.

Blockcity: Why Nxt and Ardor? Why did they move ahead so quickly when others are left behind?

Lior Yaffe: The blockchain technology is still in its infancy but it is not going away any time soon. I think that both with NXT and Ardor we are way ahead of the game with our understanding of how to build decentralized applications which are safe and scalable. This is because we have almost 4 years of perspective and experience and because we learn from our mistakes. Those who start to build new blockchain solutions now, will have to re-learn thing that we already understand.

Blockcity: Will you update Ardor after you bring it out. Are there some changes/updates that you will make later on once you see what the reception is like?

Lior Yaffe: Of course, when Ardor is released it is like any cutting edge technology. It will need a lot of work to accomplish everything we are planning. There will likely be several mandatory upgrade cycles during 2018 until we complete our product roadmap which will be published soon as part of the Ignis ICO Whitepaper.

Blockcity: Also, is Internxt a competitor?

Lior Yaffe: Never heard of Internxt, frankly, we have so many people that boldly copy our work without giving back anything or coming up with ridicules claims.

TokenStars is aiming to disrupt talent development by providing funding resources to athletes and other celebrities.

The company’s ambition to tokenize people starts with ACE – a project supporting young and experienced tennis players. With tennis being one of the most popular sports globally, ACE aims to introduce 1 billion tennis fans to the blockchain world.

TokenStars also has strong support from Forbes top-30 internet entrepreneur Elena Masolova.

The successful initial sale will allow ACE to support at least 20 tennis players and 2-5 established pros. Also, ACE might manage to sign several full-time coaches and open a small academy for ACE juniors.

Billionaire investor and founder of Oaktree Capital Management has said that cryptocurrencies ‘aren’t real.’

Marks believes cryptocurrencies are a fad similar to Tulipomania. Does he have a point? Certainly tulips went down in value from their peak and have never gone back up.

But when it comes Tulipomania, there are a number of issues to consider. For one thing tulips had only recently been introduced and become popular, so part of the initial high price may have been due to newness of the flower.

UCLA economics professor Earl A. Thompson says in a 2007 paper that the government had something to do with it. The Dutch parliament changed how tulip contracts functioned. In fact, futures contracts were to be presented as option contracts. Futures buyers didn’t have to buy the tulips but only compensate the sellers with a small percentage of the cost.

If Tulipomania can be explained as something other than a mere mania, then we can look for similar reasons in the present day as they affect the cryptocurrency market.

In fact, government has encouraged cryptocurrencies by make the dollar and other major currencies increasingly overpriced. Many of the buyers of cryptocurrencies are looking for something, anything, that will take the place of national currencies.

If this is so, as it seems to be, then we can expect that cryptocurrencies may fall a great deal during the next market crash, but at least some will not lose all value. In fact some may maintain value just like some dot.com stocks continuing strong to this day.

Is there a bubble in cyrptocurrencies. There seems to be and it could go higher, even much higher. Eventually there will be a crash. But that doesn’t mean that all cryptocurrencies will wither away. Chances are some will remain, changing the face of money with the addition of private currencies.

Soon people may be able to sell parts of assets instead of the whole thing. This could be done with special tokens that allow individuals to monetize fractions of assets, from houses to cars to paintings to decorative vases and more.

Almost anything you can think of can be monetized and even traded on a token market. This enables asset owners to more effectively leverage the value of previously illiquid holdings.

​LAToken is the platform that does this. It tokenizes assets and makes them tradable. An investor needs LATokens to buy asset tokens created on the platform and pay fees for the creation of asset token and transactions.

The platform is based on an existing home equity marketplace, founded by the CEO of LAToken, that has facilitated 12,000 mortgage offers and more

Asset owners can quickly get cash by issuing LATokens and selling fractional shares via the LAT marketplace, while keeping the actual asset for their use instead of borrowing money and paying interest or renting.

Will it work? It is certainly an interesting idea. Tokens can be bought starting on August 22.

Mt Gox founder and former CEO Mark Karpeles, is on-trial in Japan regarding bitcoin embezzlement. Karpeles has pleaded not-guilty to taking some ¥341 million in customers’ funds and has been quoted as saying, “I swear to God I am not guilty.”

Even though most defendants in Japanese courts go to prison, it seems like Karpeles may be telling the truth. A man who may be the real money launderer has been arrested in Greece. He is a Russian national, Alexander Vinnik.

The US Securities and Exchange Commission has said tokens “are subject to the requirements of the federal securities law.”

Those “tokens” represent securities, says the SEC. It adds, “…the Commission deems it appropriate and in the public interest to issue this Report in order to stress that the U.S. federal securities law may apply to various activities, including distributed ledger technology, depending on the particular facts and circumstances, without regard to the form of the organization or technology used to effectuate a particular offer or sale.”

“The innovative technology behind these virtual transactions does not exempt securities offerings and trading platforms from the regulatory framework designed to protect investors and the integrity of the markets.”

The SEC also warned about risks for participants:

“Investing in an ICO may limit your recovery in the event of fraud or theft. While you may have rights under the federal securities laws, your ability to recover may be significantly limited,” the bulletin read.

The SEC like many regulatory agencies, is basically interested in control. Protecting the investor is fairly far down on the list and the SEC is not set up to do it anyway. The market protects investors, probably not manmade laws and regs.

Dubai is on its way to being the first blockchain-powered government by 2020.

The nation has done a lot to start down this path. Recently Dubai signed up with U.K.-based ObjectTech to build digital passports. Additionally, UAE retail banking giant Emirates NBD works against check fraud and to add to security.

The government is allowing citywide blockchain payments. Dubai is on the way to being a true blockchain city.

Of course, many if not most of the improvements stated herein work to the advantage of the Dubai government.

One of the hopes regarding blockchain and certainly cybercurrencies, is that they won’t just make existing practices more efficient, but that they will fundamentally change the way things are done and make systems less invasive and freer.

Right now much of what Dubai and other countries are doing makes what is already obnoxious more intolerable. Passports have only been around in quantity for about 100 years but now Dubai will make them digital so that they can keep you permanently on file in a more efficient way.

Most everything Dubai is doing is making the collection of information more intense. That is a far cry from using the Internet to encourage freedom.

Freedom will have to come outside of established states. Perhaps with island states and other kinds of non traditional living dedicated to less rather than more officialdom.

Just because Dubai is applying blockchain to passports doesn’t fundamentally change the bureaucracy and in the long run may make it worse.

U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has said that the impetus for recent darknet raids was President Donald Trump telling the DOJ to take down cybercrime outlets like AlphaBay.

In a speech, he reportedly told the District Attorneys office, “[Donald Trump] gave us several directives. One is to dismantle transnational criminal organizations. That is what we are announcing today. Dismantling of the largest dark website in the world by far.”

AlphaBay and Hansa, were two of the biggest darknets but both have been removed. More arrests doubtless will take place as governmental confrontations continue.

But the responses to the take-downs from readers were notably less enthusiastic than Sessions determined declarations.

Many lives will be shattered from the latest “War on Drugs.” It would surely be better to legalize drugs as the United Nations is trying to do than to just crack down on them. At the Federal level the US seems to be going in the wrong direction.

Internxt is making the Internet more usable for everyday people. Using cloud technology, they are making it more decentralized.

Today websites are often hosted in one piece on servers. As a result, large companies like Google can gain access to them. Tomorrow files will be fragmented, and placed in a number of different servers. People will have more independence and few will have access to them, as they will be encrypted.

Internxt is making a decentralized cloud, and performing in other ways to decentralize the web.